The explosion of the Internet and increase of network computing has altered the manner in which software is being developed, deployed, and consumed by users. Rather than developing stand-alone software applications, many businesses are offering software in the form of web services, which are platform-independent, individual pieces of software implemented to perform a specific task within a distributed computing environment, most commonly over a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (“HTTP”), so that each web service may be accessed by heterogeneous software applications.
Due to the distributed nature of web services, any web service development effort typically demands efficient access to environmental and developmental infrastructure. Stated differently, the integrity of the development life-cycle of web services should be streamlined and managed in order to enable efficient and sustainable delivery of web service related software. However, many inefficiencies currently exist in the web services development life-cycle process, in part because current web service developmental processes still rely heavily on conventional development tools and methodologies that have been established for developing stand-alone applications, the use of which result in many challenges for web service developers and associated client software developers. For example, mostly due to the lack of a centralized resource-definition repository, many client software application development cycles are spent performing redundant resource-queries, baseline research, reconciling versioning conflicts between service and client software and the like. There has not been an integrated platform that can fully automate and streamline the development, deployment and management of web services, as well as client software access to these web services.
It is with these problems in mind, among others, that various aspects of the present disclosure were conceived.